Tech lobbyists: Immigration reform needed 'desperately'

Three top technology industry lobbyists avowed their support for comprehensive immigration reform that includes both a path to citizenship for undocumented workers and high-skilled foreign workers at Tuesday’s POLITICO Pro Tech Deep Dive focused on the 113th Congress.

“We really have no problem with a path to citizenship,” said Consumer Electronics Association President and CEO Gary Shapiro. “We need this desperately.”

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Both former Michigan Gov. John Engler, who's the president of the Business Roundtable, and ITIC President and CEO Dean Garfield agreed, although Engler noted that it’s hard to know exactly where he and his group stand until there’s a specific proposal on the table.

“Let’s be clear, there is no White House plan,” Engler said. “There’s not going to be amnesty and there’s not going to be deportation either. That has to be sorted out.”

Technology companies have been leaders in the hue and cry to expand the visa program for high-skilled labor, particularly foreigners who earn advanced degrees at U.S. colleges. Tens of thousands of engineering jobs go unfilled, the companies say, because there is not enough skilled labor among Americans nor enough visas to hire people from abroad.

“The whole debate and how it is handled is really on the other issues swirling around,” Engler said. “The reality is we have jobs out there that people who are here aren't going to do.”

Responding to a question from a viewer via Twitter, the panelists agreed that part of the problem is that the U.S. is not raising enough science- and math-interested children to grow up to do these jobs.

“There’s a huge pipeline problem,” Engler said, saying American universities are financially dependent on immigrants. “We have school after school in America that couldn’t keep them open without foreign students.”

That said, Shapiro noted that the university system itself is top-notch, as seen by the fact that there are more than 160,000 Chinese nationals attending American schools right now, he said.

“They’re coming in from overseas because we have the best universities in the world. We have investment,” Shapiro said. “We don’t have an absence of educated talent. We just export it.”

Shapiro’s tone was markedly different than the one he took in November when he harshly criticized the idea of rolling high-skilled worker visas into the mix with other elements of immigration. At the time, the House was weighing the STEM Jobs Act bill sponsored by Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) to shift 55,000 diversity visas to green cards for STEM graduates.

“I’d love to see a deal, but it seems incomprehensible to me that we would prefer random people who may be illiterate, do not speak the language, have health problems [and are] a burden on society over healthy, educated Ph.D.s,” Shapiro said at the time. “It is the height of arrogance of a nation to say that we should pick random people anywhere in the world to come here over the people we are training.”

The Smith bill passed the House and died in the Senate.

Engler noted that labor unions helped kill that measure and others — but that the outcome of the 2012 election means “the time is perfect to do immigration reform.”

This article first appeared on POLITICO Pro at 8:39 a.m. on January 15, 2013.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article mischaracterized a provision of the STEM Jobs Act bill. It would have shifted 55,000 diversity visas to green cards for STEM graduates.